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Awarding its first-ever discretionary grant in the amount of $17,070, the Cleveland Foundation helped the City of Cleveland and the Cleveland Board of Education keep open playgrounds that otherwise would have operated on limited summer hours because of lack of funds.

Eighteen students received college scholarships ranging from $100 to $725, thanks to the establishment of the first foundation fund designated to provide financial assistance to worthy undergraduates. The Cleveland Foundation presently administers about 140 scholarship funds and has awarded more than $40 million in scholarships in the last 25 years alone (see video).

Seeking to reduce the number of orphaned or abandoned children required to live in institutions on a long-term basis, the foundation initiated a multiple-year demonstration project to be undertaken by two private welfare agencies, the Children’s Bureau and the Cleveland Humane Society, to test the feasibility of placing orphans in foster homes. The demonstration, which proved the benefits of foster family care, gradually reduced the reliance on institutional care here.

A $1,000 grant advanced the highly significant hypertension research of Harry Goldblatt, M.D., director of Western Reserve University’s Institute of Pathology. Goldblatt’s experiments in the 1930s provided a partial answer to clinicians’ bafflement about the causes of hypertension. He demonstrated that if a portion of the main arteries to the kidneys was clamped, blood pressure rose. Goldblatt won international acclaim for his subsequent research identifying elevated levels of renin, an enzyme that regulates arterial blood pressure, as a factor contributing to hypertension.

The foundation financed a demonstration project that created a model nursery school at Lakeview Terrace, a public housing project on Cleveland’s near west side. A pioneering early childhood development program, the nursery school was housed in a modern building with well-equipped indoor and outdoor play spaces supervised by an experienced staff. It also offered preschool-age children from tenant families a hot lunch daily and on-site medical services such as immunizations. Hundreds of visitors from other nursery schools and housing projects, social agencies, colleges, hospitals and public health departments came to observe and learn from the school before its operation was taken over by the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority in 1940.

Acknowledging its obligation to confer grants “without discrimination [on the basis] of race, color or creed,” the foundation awarded $1,500 to the Cleveland Girl Scout Council for an expansion of its programming for “negro girls.” The grant, which was used to recruit leadership for new troops and to meet transportation and camping costs for troops requiring financial assistance, was a bellwether of the Cleveland Foundation’s much more substantial support of concerted efforts to serve new racial and ethnic constituencies undertaken by a variety of community organizations beginning in the 1950s.

The presiding judge of the domestic relations division of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court gained the support of the Cleveland Foundation for a demonstration program to slow the rapidly increasing number of divorce petitions. The program showed that provision of the services of a “competent psychiatrist” could bring about the reconciliation of some petitioners, to the benefit of the couple, their children and the community generally. Family counseling and conciliation remain important functions of the domestic relations court to this day.

Carrying out the wishes of donor Frederick W. Judd, the foundation began to provide annual funds to the Cleveland Public Library (CPL) to enable it to serve those who were too ill, incapacitated or elderly to visit a library branch. CPL, which had been making books available to hospitals, other institutions and the blind with federal support, developed a first-of-its-kind program to deliver materials to shut-ins in their homes. The Judd Fund program is still in operation today.

Before the foundation provided start-up funds to the Golden Age Centers of Cleveland (GAC), few if any local social service programs specifically addressed the needs of senior citizens. GAC’s first project—a recreational center for tenants 60 and older at the Cedar-Central public housing complex—was a popular success. The innovative organization went on to open 15 additional centers offering a wide spectrum of services to the elderly.

With increasing numbers of persons traveling by air, the Cleveland Foundation supported the plans of the Travelers Aid Society to expand its services to Cleveland-Hopkins Airport. Backed by a two-year grant, the society set up an office at the airport to provide information, assistance or crisis intervention to the traveling public.

The Metropolitan Study Commission (METRO)—an investigation of the advisability of converting Greater Cleveland to a metropolitan form of government—got under way with the help of Cleveland and Ford foundation grants. METRO's findings about the benefits of consolidation failed to convince voters when the issue came to the ballot in 1958, but study director James A. Norton went on to become the fifth director of the Cleveland Foundation.

Recognizing the dangers posed by the thousands of new household products coming into routine use, the Academy of Medicine of Cleveland established a Poison Information Center with a start-up grant from the foundation. The center offered physicians detailed information about the chemical composition of all types of toxic substances and first aid advice to members of the public who called in seeking help in treating cases of accidental poisoning.

Forest City Hospital, a 100-bed general medical center built by a group of African-American physicians who wanted to practice in a hospital free of race restrictions, survived its difficult first year of operation with the help of the foundation’s $35,000 emergency grant. Its financial footing regained, Forest City served the residents of Cleveland’s far east side for 20 years. When the hospital closed, its assets were transferred to the new Forest City Hospital Fund at the Cleveland Foundation. In 1981, fund monies helped to launch a capital campaign to replace the antiquated mansion housing the Eliza Bryant Center for the frail elderly in Hough with a new $4.5 million facility that doubled the nursing home’s capacity.

Case Institute of Technology received a grant to broadcast astronomical events as seen at the school’s observatory to students in campus classrooms, a pioneering use of television in educational instruction.

The public defender’s office of Cleveland’s Legal Aid Society was established with a $100,000 grant two years before the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that state courts must provide counsel to represent indigent defendants in criminal cases.

A 1957 master plan for University Circle identified the immense land-use challenges facing Cleveland’s civic mecca, then home to 34 education, arts and culture and healthcare institutions. Affirming the importance of maintaining the Circle’s viability, the Cleveland Foundation made a three-year grant of $180,000 in 1961 to support the operation of the University Circle Development Foundation (UCDF), a central planning agency whose establishment had been recommended by the master planners as essential to the Circle’s orderly growth.

UCDF took responsibility for providing collectively needed services, such as public safety, shuttle transportation and parking. It also assembled a land bank upon which Circle institutions could draw to meet future expansion needs. In 1970, UCDF was reorganized as University Circle Inc. and given the added responsibility of building relationships with the residents of surrounding neighborhoods.

A grant of less than $2,500 helped Cleveland’s Academy of Medicine launch what was at the time the largest mass polio immunization program ever undertaken in the world. Approximately 1.5 million Greater Clevelanders received the Sabin oral vaccine during the immunization campaign, preventing untold suffering and medical expenditures.

PACE (Plan for Action by Citizens in Education), a broad-based school improvement campaign that aimed to make Cleveland’s public schools “second to none in the country by 1970,” was organized with the support of the Cleveland Foundation’s affiliated philanthropy, the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation. Among PACE’s most important accomplishments was to raise the monies to establish and outfit libraries in all of the city’s public elementary schools, which did not have these essential learning resources.

Following the defeat of a proposed municipal income tax at the polls, business leaders prevailed upon Mayor Ralph S. Locher to create a commission to study the City of Cleveland’s operations and recommend improvements and financial savings. Financed in part by the corporate and philanthropic communities (including the Cleveland Foundation and its affiliated philanthropy, the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation), the Little Hoover Commission issued 21 reports by professional analysts covering every aspect of the municipal governance—from purchasing to the judiciary.

Although fewer than half of the commission’s 500-plus recommendations were implemented, its findings highlighted the need for improved procedures, professional training and community relations practices in the city police department, many of which were put into place following the Hough riots with additional support from the abovementioned foundations. The Little Hoover Commission’s findings also prompted Cleveland City Council to enact a 0.5 percent city income tax that provided much-needed new funding for local government services.

The Cleveland Foundation contributed $18,000 to a successful five-year campaign led by the Ohio chapter of the Nature Conservancy and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to acquire all the acreage constituting the threatened Mentor Marsh in Lake County. One of the largest natural wetlands remaining along the Lake Erie shoreline, Mentor Marsh became the first state nature preserve in 1971.

The West Side Community House, an Ohio City-based social service agency whose origins date back to 1890, launched one of the city’s earliest bilingual outreach efforts with foundation support. The agency wanted to better serve the growing number of Spanish-speaking families who were relocating from the east side to Ohio City in order to be closer to jobs in the nearby industrial “Flats.” In collaboration with the Spanish American Committee for a Better Community, it started a social service and recreational center exclusively for Hispanics families. Still working today to promote the socioeconomic success of Spanish-speaking Clevelanders, the Spanish American Committee is the city’s oldest Hispanic human services organization.

The Cleveland Area Arts Council (CAAC) opened for business in the Old Arcade in 1972 with Cleveland Foundation funding. It was the first local attempt to enhance public enjoyment of the arts and strengthen their financial base. With ongoing operating support from the foundation, the council demonstrated considerable creativity in bringing culture to the people, sponsoring noon-hour concerts and opera performances in the Old Arcade, holding poetry readings in libraries and coffeehouses, and initiating a popular mural painting program called “City Canvases” to beautify downtown. Although CAAC’s failure to build a broad base of financial support for its activities forced its closure in 1979, the council did raise awareness of the need to secure a solid base of public and corporate support for arts and culture upon which subsequent foundation initiatives were built.

Spurred by 39-year-old Gwill York, a former president of the Junior League of Cleveland who in 1971 had replaced Pamela Firman Humphrey as the sole woman on the foundation board, the Cleveland Foundation began to champion local women’s initiatives. The first empowerment grant was awarded in 1972 to the Women’s Law Fund, a team of female attorneys helping women litigate cases of sex discrimination. The Rape Crisis Center, which counseled victims and monitored police response to rape reports, was the most prominent of a host of new women’s organizations that received foundation support in the 1970s.

The foundation also contributed more than $50,000 in 1975 to the Greater Cleveland Congress of the International Women’s Year (IWY), the largest such convocation of women’s rights activists in the country. A follow-up grant of $47,700 launched WomenSpace, a central gathering place for women working to advance the U.S. Women’s Agenda ratified at IWY Congresses around the country.

Carrying out the terms of a bequest from Grace Jordan Gardner, the Cleveland Foundation elevated Gardner’s wish to fund a home for the aged into an opportunity to create a model residential center. A citizens’ committee, advised by highly qualified consultants in gerontology and design, developed criteria for the home, which was to offer comprehensive social and health services and financial assistance to the needy elderly. Twenty-two licensed nonprofit nursing home operators entered the competition for a $1 million grant. The Baptist Home of Ohio (now the Judson Retirement Community) submitted the winning proposal for an expansion of its Judson Park facility on Cleveland’s east side. The new Jordan-Gardner Tower, offering independent living facilities, opened in 1974.

After being turned away by several other philanthropies, the Glenville Health Association received an award of several hundred thousand dollars from the Cleveland Foundation to start a model health clinic for the indigent. The vote of confidence enabled the clinic’s organizers to raise the $2 million needed to launch, equip and subsidize the operation of the clinic until it became self-supporting. The foundation recognized that the clinic was a less costly expenditure than the long-term societal costs of failing to provide the residents of the central-city neighborhood of Glenville with preventive medical care. Opened in 1974, the clinic provided comprehensive medical, dental and mental health care to Glenville residents, regardless of their ability to pay, for more than 15 years.

Cleveland Ballet, a professional classical ballet company that began to take shape in 1972, gave its first full-scale public performances at the Hanna Theatre in 1976, buoyed by a foundation grant awarded the previous year to nurture the company’s growth and artistic excellence. Also in 1976, the foundation supported the start-up of New Cleveland Opera, the city’s first major resident opera-producing company. Although ambitious and costly, these ventures filled significant holes in the city’s cultural offerings and attracted enthusiastic new audiences to their stages in Playhouse Square.

Shaker Square, the first planned shopping center in Ohio, opened on the eastern border of Cleveland in 1929 to acclaim as one of the country’s most architecturally refined retail districts. With its exclusive shops, elaborate window displays and  special events, such as a holiday lighting ceremony, the shopping center—named for its location in suburban Shaker Heights—remained a popular destination well into the 1950s.

At the approach of its 50th anniversary, however, Shaker Square had fallen into serious disrepair. In 1976, the Friends of Shaker Square, a broad-based citizens’ coalition formed to push for the shopping district’s restoration, won matching grants of $39,000 each from the Cleveland Foundation and the City of Cleveland to pay for a professional staff. The grants enabled Friends to plan how to most effectively spend federal development funds promised by the city to attract merchants and shoppers back to Shaker Square. This work marked the rebirth of a landmark district whose vibrancy is crucial to the stability of both Cleveland and Shaker Heights.

The long-overdue repair or replacement of Cleveland’s roads, bridges and sewers was brought to the fore in a 1978 national study after the foundation arranged with the study’s author, Washington’s Urban Institute, for Cleveland to be one of the cities examined. “The Future of Cleveland’s Capital Plant” documented a staggering $1.3 billion backlog of needed capital improvements.

The Greater Cleveland Growth Association and the Cleveland Foundation brought the Urban Institute back to help city officials develop a master capital improvement and financing plan. This timely intervention enabled Cleveland to obtain hundreds of millions in federal, state and local funds earmarked for infrastructure rebuilding. Perhaps the most important of the resulting capital projects was the rebuilding of bridges carrying traffic around the Terminal Tower. Without this improvement, Forest City Enterprises, the skyscraper’s new owners, would have been unable to proceed with a $200 million plan to develop new offices, a hotel and a shopping mall called The Avenue at Tower City at the site.

Starting with a $25,000 grant to the Shaker Lakes Garden Center that underwrote a 1974 study by the William A. Behnke Associates landscape architecture firm of ways to improve conditions in Cleveland’s municipal-run parks, the Cleveland Foundation led an effort to restore these invaluable recreational assets.

Recognizing that the City of Cleveland could no longer afford to maintain all of its 3,000 acres of parklands, the foundation guided political discussions that led to the transfer in 1978 of responsibility for the maintenance and management of Edgewater, Gordon and Wildwood (now Euclid Beach) Parks from the city to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR).

The renamed Cleveland Lakefront State Park was immediately restored to cleanliness and working order under state stewardship, and ODNR subsequently spent more than $40 million to outfit the parklands with new fishing piers, boat launches, marinas, bike and jogging paths, restrooms and picnic areas. Within a few years, park patronage skyrocketed, leaping from 750,000 visitors annually to more than 12 million.

The Center for Regional Economic Issues (REI), in operation at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management from 1986 until 2005, was an outgrowth of a foundation-sponsored study of the battered Cleveland economy conducted by the Rand Corporation in 1980. In addition to assessing regional economic trends on an industry-by-industry basis—hard data that had been lacking from civic deliberations about how to reverse the region’s postwar stagnation—the California think tank’s report pointed out the benefits of establishing an ongoing capacity to conduct sophisticated economic research on which informed economic development policies and programs could be based. In partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the Cleveland Foundation established REI in 1983 to provide hard data and analysis about the regional economy and to make this information widely available for public- and private-sector decision making. The successful effort to enhance Greater Cleveland’s capacity to monitor its economic activity was led by Susan Lajoie Eagan, who later served as the foundation’s executive vice president.

The creation of Cleveland Housing Network (CHN) to provide technical support for housing rehabilitation represented an important first step toward the development of a coherent civic strategy for neighborhood revitalization. CHN built on the success of an innovative program conceived by the Hough-based Famicos Foundation, which acquired and rehabilitated substandard homes that were then rented at very reasonable rates to carefully screened low-income families, who had the option of taking title to the properties after 15 years.

The Cleveland Foundation invested $500,000 in the start-up and operation of CHN, which showed neighborhood development organizations (NDOs) struggling to rehab one or two houses a year how to dramatically increase their annual rates of production. By 1986, CHN had established a working relationship with nine NDOs, resulting in the rehabilitation of more than 220 housing units throughout Cleveland.

In 1989, CHN launched a new program to boost the percentage of owner-occupied properties in Cleveland by providing financial assistance and incentives to aspiring home buyers with low to moderate incomes. To date, CHN’s Homeward Program has produced more than 1,000 units of market-rate housing, generating more than $60 million in direct capital investment in Cleveland’s neighborhoods.

More recently, CHN has become involved, with ongoing foundation support, in the rehabilitation or development of multifamily properties, senior housing and permanent housing for the chronically homeless.

Beginning with a small grant that allowed Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival (GLSF) to market its productions of classic plays to audiences outside the summer theater’s home base in suburban Lakewood, the Cleveland Foundation has patiently nurtured GLSF’s artistic growth. The foundation was the first to encourage the company, now known as Great Lakes Theater, to lease the Ohio Theatre on Playhouse Square, a win-win proposition for tenant and landlord. (The Hanna Theatre on Playhouse Square ultimately became the company's permanent home.)

Among the offerings of GLSF’s 1982 opening season in the magnificently restored 1,000-seat theater was an 8.5-hour theatrical adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel Nicholas Nickleby, directed by the festival’s new artistic director, Ireland’s Abbey Theatre alum Vincent Dowling. The elaborate production, made possible in part by a $125,000 foundation grant, attracted local raves and national attention for the up-and-coming theater company.

In 1982, the Cleveland Foundation became the first community foundation in the country to make a program-related investment (PRI), thus ensuring that the restoration of the Playhouse Square theaters and revitalization of the theater district did not grind to a halt. The concept behind a PRI is to invest principal to advance projects that have not only socioeconomic value but also the potential to produce a reasonable return on the investment. In applying a $3.6 million PRI toward the purchase of the Bulkley and Selzer Buildings on Euclid Avenue near East 14th Street, the foundation secured the land needed for the reconstruction of the State Theatre stage house to accommodate professional ballet and opera productions at a time when the PlayhouseSquare Foundation (PSF) did not have the necessary funds to act.

While many others were pessimistic about downtown Cleveland’s future, the foundation had embraced PSF’s vision of a theater district enlivened by restaurants, hotels, shops and office buildings. The Bulkley and Selzer Buildings were central to the envisioned redevelopment of the Playhouse Square superblock. In 1986, the foundation sold property it had acquired as part of an attempt to redevelop the Bulkley complex as an enclosed shopping center. However, the sale to PSF provided the theater district with a much-needed parking lot, which ultimately became a profit center.

Finding real estate development to be feasible, PSF went on to bootstrap the financing needed to build a 205-room Wyndham Hotel at Euclid Avenue and Huron Road. The Bulkley Building, which the foundation sold for $6.1 million in 1987 to a private developer, ultimately became part of PSF’s income-producing real estate holdings. The foundation’s gap financing—a $1 million-plus loan and an agreement to hold a second mortgage of $850,000—made the building’s purchase possible in 2002.

MidTown Corridor, Inc., a private neighborhood reclamation effort fueled largely by the vision and energy of its co-founder, Premier Industrial Corporation chairman and CEO Morton Mandel, had within its first five years succeeded in stemming disinvestment in the deteriorating inner-city business district in which Premier was located. Physical improvements, business expansions and new business development were visible throughout the corridor stretching from University Circle to downtown between Euclid and Carnegie Avenues.

But the embryonic economic development corporation recognized that it had reached a turning point by 1986. With the support of a foundation grant, MidTown conceived a bold plan that persuaded the City of Cleveland to acquire and demolish the outdated, oversized, unused factory buildings that occupied so much of the corridor’s potentially valuable real estate. Additional foundation grants enabled MidTown Corridor to purchase a cleared 20-acre parcel at East 65th Street and market it as an industrial park. Although not an overnight success, MidTown Commerce Park marked the first stage in the corridor’s repositioning as a “health-tech” district, which is now home to 600 businesses, 18,000 employees and 2,000 residents.

During its first decade, the Cleveland International Film Festival screened the best of contemporary world cinema primarily at the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights. Recognizing the financial imperative of making this annual event accessible to filmgoers across the region, the Cleveland Foundation encouraged the festival to move its 1986 opening-night festivities downtown to Playhouse Square’s Ohio Theatre by underwriting the installation of the requisite projection and audio equipment. The festival permanently moved downtown to a theater complex in Tower City in 1991. It has since enjoyed a 600 percent growth in attendance.

With the publication of The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Cleveland became the only U.S. city to have such a reference work, which covered everything from the region’s prehistoric inhabitants to the city’s recent recovery from default. Weighing in at five pounds and 1,127 pages, the encyclopedia had first been suggested to its eventual co-editors, David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, by retired Cleveland Foundation director Homer C. Wadsworth. A series of foundation grants supported the research and writing of more than 2,300 entries. An updated edition of the encyclopedia can now be found online.

In response to concerns about Cuyahoga County’s unacceptable poverty rate, which had surpassed the nationwide average, the Cleveland Center for Urban Poverty and Social Change was established at Case Western Reserve University in 1988 with joint funding from the Cleveland and Rockefeller Foundations. Under the leadership of director Claudia Coulton, the center set out to provide the area’s socioeconomic policymakers with previously unavailable data that might help to explain the county’s high and ever-increasing poverty rate.

Released in 1989, the so-called Coulton Report revealed the precise geographical areas with high concentrations of poverty and helpfully broke down poverty into four types based on degrees of newness or persistence. The growing demand for a highly educated workforce, the outmigration of jobs to the suburbs, the isolating influence of public housing and the sharp decline in economic investment in central-city neighborhoods—all played a role in impoverishing individuals and families. In pinpointing the causes of poverty, the Coulton Report contained the germs of new ideas about how to combat the problem.

By the 1990s, northeastern Ohio, like the nation, had lost a significant number of manufacturing jobs. Nevertheless, more than one-fifth of all jobs in the region were still in manufacturing, and each year the sector generated more than $11 billion in payroll spending. Especially concerned about the retention and expansion of Cleveland-based manufacturing companies, the Cleveland Foundation provided more than $210,000 in 1992 to the Cleveland Advanced Manufacturing Program (CAMP) to enable the management and technology consultants to open a “teaching factory” for college students.

Working in collaboration with Cuyahoga Community College and Cleveland State University, CAMP’s Manufacturing Learning Center offered hands-on courses that supplemented the colleges’ curricula in order to produce the highly skilled workers needed to ensure the competitiveness and growth of Cleveland’s small to mid-sized manufacturing companies. A second grant of $200,000 in 1994 helped CAMP obtain $5 million in federal monies to expand the reach of the learning center, which had already gained national prominence for the effectiveness of its training, to older workers.

When completed in 1994, Gateway—the intended home of the Cleveland Indians’ new baseball stadium and the Cleveland Cavaliers’ new basketball arena—was expected to dramatically enhance downtown’s attractiveness as a destination for tourists and residents. To ensure that the public spaces surrounding the sports complex were as exciting as the stadium and arena themselves, in 1992 the Cleveland Foundation made a $750,000 grant and a $2 million program-related investment to provide Gateway Economic Development Corporation with the resources to design and construct gracious exterior plazas filled with public art.

A competitive application process overseen by Cleveland Public Art attracted 125 submissions, from which four artists were commissioned to create outdoor works that became overnight sensations with fans. R. M. Fischer’s Sports Stacks, incorporating elements of the complex’s exhaust system … Nancy Dwyer’s benches entitled Meet Me Here and Who’s on First? … and a planting bed/seating area decorated with Penny Rakoff’s historic photographs of the old Central Market that once occupied the site and Angelica Pozo’s ceramic tiles of market produce would likely not have been created without the support of the foundation’s “patient money.”

The Ohio Canal Corridor Inc. received a $40,000 foundation grant to support its efforts to secure a “National Heritage Corridor” designation for the historic Ohio & Erie Canal route, extending south from Lake Erie through the Cuyahoga River Valley to New Philadelphia, Ohio. Congress awarded the canalway this recognition in 1996, paving the way for Ohio Canal Corridor Inc. to receive $1 million in federal funds. A second $40,000 grant in 1997 enabled the heritage corridor’s chief advocacy and management group to develop a strategic plan for using these funds to advance development of the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail, an envisioned 100-mile-long scenic hiking and biking trail.

By the early 2000s, the Cleveland Foodbank was northeastern Ohio’s largest hunger relief organization. It provided nearly 19 million pounds of food to its member agencies annually. But lack of storage at its 100-year-old main warehouse and distribution center downtown required the organization to turn away almost 1.5 million tons of provisions each year.

In 2003, the Cleveland Foundation contributed $1 million toward the $10 million cost of constructing a new 60,000-square-foot facility for the Foodbank near Interstate 90 on the far east side of Cleveland. The new headquarters, which opened in 2004, positioned the organization to expand its services. Unfortunately, the economic downturn dramatically increased demand in neighborhoods the Foodbank had not previously served and did not have the capacity to fulfill. A $300,000 grant from the foundation in 2009 supported the hiring of three additional staff members and the addition of four mobile pantries, enabling the Foodbank to offer hunger relief to an additional 160,000 persons.

In the early 2000s, a number of barriers stood in the way of recapturing the entrepreneurial energy on which Cleveland’s former economic prosperity was based. Aspiring entrepreneurs were hampered by a lack of skills necessary to convert good ideas into successful businesses, a scarcity of early-stage capital and a shortage of networking and support systems. With the help of a $300,000 grant from the Cleveland Foundation, JumpStart was launched in 2003 to provide business development services and seed monies to high-potential start-up firms.

The foundation subsequently invested $2 million in JumpStart’s venture-capital fund and granted $750,000 toward operations in 2010. The more than 120 high-growth companies currently in JumpStart’s investment portfolio or on its list of clients have indisputably boosted the regional economy. Since 2003, they have contributed $200 million in economic impact, attracted $517 million in venture capital and created or retained more than 1,500 jobs.

The Cleveland Foundation launched the Civic Innovation Lab in 2003 to test whether providing start-up funding, mentorship, networking opportunities and visibility to individuals with creative ideas for new small businesses should be part of Greater Cleveland’s economic development strategy. In the first “class” of grantees in 2004 was Cool Cleveland, a weekly e-mail newsletter launched in 2002 to cover the people, places and activities deemed “cool” by its founder and publisher, Thomas Mulready. The foundation’s $30,000 grant gave the experimental online publication time to find its voice, develop a successful business plan and secure a devoted audience that appreciated Mulready’s edgy take on the things that make Cleveland great.

Believing in the talent and promise of urban youth, the Cleveland Foundation sought to demonstrate that public school students could achieve their potential if given an opportunity to learn in high-performance educational settings. In 2006, the foundation partnered with the George Gund Foundation and the Cleveland Municipal School District to create a portfolio of new, innovative and excellent schools. To date, the two foundations have contributed more than $16 million in grants to the initiative.

As a result, there are now 20 portfolio schools in Cleveland: 13 district innovative schools and seven charter schools sponsored by the district. Many of them are built around the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines that are widely accepted as a key to success in a knowledge-based, technology-driven global economy. Others are single-gender or residential academies.

Three innovative high schools located in University Circle on the John Hay campus, which reopened in 2006 after extensive renovation, exemplify the range of excellent educational options now available to Cleveland public school students. The School of Science and Medicine boasts a 100 percent graduation rate, with 100 percent of its students accepted into college. Cleveland Early College High School offers high-achieving students an accelerated curriculum that allows them to graduate high school in three years, often armed with college credits. The Cleveland School of Architecture and Design, which features a project-based, college-preparatory curriculum, has earned an Excellent rating by the State of Ohio Department of Education each year since its opening in 2010.

With the support of a $3 million grant awarded by the Cleveland Foundation in 2008, NewBridge Cleveland Center for Arts and Technology opened in MidTown in the fall of 2010. The airy high-tech building houses a vocational program that prepares adults for careers as phlebotomy and pharmacy technicians and after-school arts classes for teens poised on the brink of quitting school. NewBridge is modeled after Pittsburgh’s highly successful Manchester Bidwell training center, which has been in operation since 1968.

The foundation led a collaborative effort to replicate the Manchester Bidwell program here. Cleveland’s leading medical institutions advised on the design of the adult curricula, resulting in a high rate of employment of the 36 adults who graduated in 2011 and 2012.

More than 350 ninth- and 10th-graders selected by 40 high schools from across the county attended free, hands-on classes in ceramics, photography, digital arts, and music recording and production during the 2011–12 academic year. In contrast to usual turnout for afterschool programs, which often fail to attract young men, 55 percent of the attendees were male. The foundation affirmed its belief in NewBridge’s effectiveness with a second grant of $1.5 million in 2011.

The Cleveland Foundation awarded $1.45 million over five years to fund the Greater Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance, a coalition of the City of Cleveland Community Relations Board and seven community organizations that addresses gang and street violence in the city and its inner-ring suburbs. The alliance, whose members include Amer-I-Can Cleveland, Boys & Girls Club Cleveland and the Guardian Angels, trains outreach workers in conflict resolution, cultural diversity and community engagement.

Peacemakers make themselves known in high-crime neighborhoods, seeking opportunities to mentor street youth and connect them to social services and recreational activities organized by the alliance. They also assist schools with crisis prevention and help police with crowd control. The outreach program contributed to a 37 percent decrease in crimes involving youth and guns committed in Cleveland in 2012.

Starting in 1975, with a three-year operating grant to the fledgling Detroit Shoreway Community Development Corporation, the foundation has been a champion of the redevelopment of the Gordon Square commercial district centering on a historic arcade at Detroit Avenue and West 65th Street. The foundation’s initial grant gave Detroit Shoreway organizers the capacity to save the half-vacant Gordon Square Arcade from demolition and apply for a $200,000 Urban Development Action Grant to rehab the grand old building, which once housed the 1,500-seat Capitol movie theater, a hotel, apartments and office spaces.

In the mid-2000s, the community development organization capped its steady progress in revivifying the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood by creating the Gordon Square Arts District, home to new or renovated facilities for the Cleveland Public Theatre, a presenter of experimental drama; the Near West Theatre, a training ground for youth; and the Capitol Theatre, which reopened in 2009 as a venue for first-run and independent movies after rehabilitation supported by a $500,000 foundation grant. The Cleveland Foundation has contributed another $500,000 to the art district’s $30 million capital campaign, which is expected to leverage $500 million in related retail, restaurant and housing development in a 15-block area along Detroit Avenue.

Creative Fusion, the Cleveland Foundation’s innovative artist-in-residence program, supports long-term residencies at local arts organizations for accomplished international artists, with a goal of expanding the region’s exposure to world culture. Selected and hosted by cultural institutions throughout Greater Cleveland, the artists hail from cultures not well represented here. As they conduct classes and workshops, create and perform, they provide the benefits of creative exchange with their local counterparts, hands-on learning experiences with students of all ages, and deep engagement with the general public. As of 2012, Creative Fusion had brought 16 visiting artists—from countries ranging from Chile to Uganda—to Cleveland, where they, too, have benefited from experiencing three months in an American heartland city.

The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Food Policy Coalition, representing a spectrum of stakeholders—from hunger relief advocates to urban and rural farmers—came together in 2007 to create a more equitable, healthy and sustainable food system for northeastern Ohioans. In 2009, the coalition received capacity-building grants from the Cleveland and George Gund Foundations. With increased staffing, the coalition was able to reach out to farmers’ markets in Cleveland in an attempt to make fresh fruits and vegetables a household staple in neighborhoods where produce was not readily available, especially to those in the greatest financial need.

In 2010, a pilot program to incentivize produce consumption was launched. Four markets agreed to offer $5 extra to customers who spent at least $5 on fruits, vegetables, seeds and edible plants, using EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards containing their food assistance benefits. By 2012, 16 farmers’ markets and food stands across Cuyahoga County were participating in the “Produce Perks” program. EBT sales recorded that year at all the markets amounted to more than $26,000—evidence that Produce Perks is producing new business for farmers’ markets and healthier, tastier meals for their new customers.

MyCom (My Commitment, My Community) may be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken in Cuyahoga County to provide underserved city youths with the kinds of life-enhancing, responsibility-building experiences that middle-class children take for granted: out-of-school enrichment activities, caring adult mentors, summer jobs. The planning for MyCom began in 2007, when some 250 community organizations, government agencies, faith-based groups, and youths came together at the Cleveland Foundation’s invitation to consider how to mitigate adolescents’ exposure to risk and help them harness their potential. The foundation’s $2.5 million in grants to support the launch of MyCom in 2009 leveraged $4.1 million from other funders, including the initiative’s principal partner, Cuyahoga County.

To make the most efficient and effective use of its funding, the partners decided not to create another program, but to connect youngsters to all the appropriate programs already in existence. MyCom’s evolving online and phone-accessible directory points parents and kids to more than 1,900 activities and services such as tutoring and career exploration. In its first year, MyCom’s jobs program found summer work for 3,600 teens. The long-term goal is to secure summer jobs for a greater percentage of the 11,000 first-year applicants and to expand MyCom’s offerings beyond eight pilot neighborhoods: Bellaire-Puritas, Central, Cudell-West Park, Mt. Pleasant, St. Clair-Superior, Slavic Village, northern Parma and southern Shaker Heights.

The City of Cleveland has an aggressive program to tear down homes abandoned due to disrepair or foreclosure. As a result, the metropolitan area has an inventory of about 20,000 vacant lots. The financial crisis of 2007–08, which dramatically increased the number of homes in foreclosure, prompted Neighborhood Progress, Inc., a redevelopment intermediary now known as Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, to work with government officials and community development organizations on a solution to the growing problem of empty lots. A $250,000 grant from the Cleveland Foundation underwrote a formal study of strategies for sustainable land reuse in 2009.

Using $500,000 in federal urban redevelopment money, the public-private partnership subsequently piloted a demonstration project to test the feasibility of various reclamation ideas. Fifty-six neighborhood groups, churches, schools and individuals received grants from Neighborhood Progress’s “Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland” program in the first round in 2010. The successful conversion of weedy lots into community gardens, pocket parks, orchards and spacious side yards convinced the city to raise $1 million for a second round of grants in 2011.

Cleveland’s first annual Asian Festival, mounted in observation of Asian Pacific-American Heritage Month in May 2010, received a $5,000 foundation grant to support the organization of a weekend-long celebration. Approximately 10,000 people crowded into Asia Plaza in the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood to enjoy cultural and martial arts performances, authentic Asian cuisine and ethnic merchandise.

The foundation’s modest investment in testing new ideas and partnerships was rewarded many times over. Greater Clevelanders responded to this opportunity to partake of the city’s rich diversity by swelling festival attendance to more than 30,000 in 2011 and 50,000 in 2012. The St. Clair-Superior Development Organization recognized the festival’s economic benefits for the surrounding neighborhood by presenting the Asian Festival with its 2011 Community Action Group Award.

America faces a shortage of primary care physicians that will only become more severe when aging baby boomers become the frail elderly. The lack of primary care is especially acute in urban neighborhoods. In Greater Cleveland, a pioneering collaboration between the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) and Cleveland State University (CSU) is tackling the shortage head-on.

With the support of a $250,000 planning grant from the Cleveland Foundation, the two institutions of higher education began in 2010 to design a unique training program that takes advantage of their combined strengths in urban health, primary care medicine and inter-professional education. The resulting initiative, now known as NEOMED-CSU Partnership for Urban Health,  is targeted at economically disadvantaged youth who reside in the region, offering them two paths to becoming a primary care physician. They can complete their undergraduate work at CSU and then qualify for early admission to NEOMED, where they can earn a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree. For students who already have college degrees, there is a post-baccalaureate/M.D. option.

The partner institutions received a second foundation grant of $1.5 million in 2012 to implement the initiative, which accepted its first class of 35 students that fall. In addition to formal coursework, students receive hands-on experience working with a small caseload of patients in a medically underserved neighborhood in Cleveland. Scholarships are awarded to students in exchange for a commitment to practice here for a specified period of time after their residencies. With 63 aspirants now enrolled, the program could significantly reduce the shortage of primary care physicians in Cleveland’s neighborhoods within a few short years.

Responding to the needs of “economically isolated” entrepreneurs, the Cleveland Foundation assembled a working group to examine the issue of small business lending in early 2011. A subsequent study of the microcredit landscape in Cuyahoga County, which the foundation commissioned with the Business of Good Foundation, estimated an unmet need of $38 million in loans under $50,000. The gap primarily affects minorities, immigrants and women, whose businesses may be either too small to interest conventional lenders or deemed not creditworthy.

The first small, but proactive, steps to address this issue, supported by Cleveland Foundation grants, met with positive results that prompted the formation of a public-private partnership consisting of the foundation, the City of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, the U.S. Small Business Administration, Huntington Bank, the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the Commission on Economic Inclusion and the Business of Good Foundation. The partners contributed $4 million to fund microloans and $600,000 to provide loan recipients with training and technical assistance. The Columbus-based Economic and Community Development Institute (ECDI) was recruited to manage the microlending program.

Even before the program’s July 2012 launch, ECDI had made eight loans to local entrepreneurs totaling $163,000. As of the end of 2013, 30 businesses owned predominately by women or racial or ethnic minorities had received loans totaling $1.3 million. Nearly a third of these enterprises are based within the city of Cleveland.

MAGNET, a longtime foundation grantee previously known as the Cleveland Advanced Manufacturing Program (CAMP), is making an important transition from its former emphasis on helping local manufacturers solve specific problems to its new focus on establishing long-term consulting relationships that will help manufacturing CEOs grow their companies.

With the support of a Cleveland Foundation grant of $400,000 awarded in 2011, MAGNET has begun to develop a comprehensive network of experts and resources to which its clients can be directed for assistance. Called PRISM (Partnership for Regional Innovation Services to Manufacturers), MAGNET’s new program seeks to help companies with annual sales of between $10 million and $500 million create new products and enter new markets, thus propelling double-digit percentage sales growth.

A second foundation grant of $400,000 awarded in early 2013 will enable MAGNET to expand PRISM’s portfolio of clients with an eye to fostering the creation of 20,000 new jobs in northeastern Ohio by 2020.

To ensure the successful reintegration into society of the 5,000 Greater Clevelanders who are released from Ohio’s prisons each year and reduce recidivism rates in the metropolitan area, the Cleveland Foundation collaborated with Cuyahoga County officials and the Centers for Families and Children on the development of an innovative pilot re-entry program called Transformation Enterprises.

With a $150,000 grant in 2011, the foundation joined with its partners in funding the creation of three small companies—a food preparation business, a home renovation business and a beauty salon—to employ individuals with felony convictions. Although the businesses are managed by nonprofit organizations, they are for-profit ventures whose revenues support job training for their employees.

Aware that 70 percent of all recidivism occurs within the first 12 months of re-entry, Transformation Enterprises facilitates immediate employment and also provides “soft-skills” training and job placement assistance to enable employees to find nonsubsidized work. More than half of the 32 employees who have “graduated” from the renovation business begun in 2012 by Career Development and Placement Services have secured full-time jobs elsewhere.

The Global Cleveland initiative has set the objective of attracting 100,000 talented newcomers to the region from around the world in an effort to counter Cuyahoga County’s steady population loss and reclaim the entrepreneurial energy generated by previous waves of immigrants. On February 7, 2012, Global Cleveland opened an international welcome center in the Huntington Bank building near Public Square with the support of a $150,000 foundation grant.

The welcome center will be both an information resource for people considering the possibility of relocating to Greater Cleveland and the headquarters of Global Cleveland, a concept first advanced by the Jewish Federation of Cleveland and widely embraced by the community’s civic and political leadership as the best means of recruiting the highly skilled employees needed to fuel the growth of the region’s high-tech businesses and industries.

The Cleveland Foundation underscored the importance of securing the future of the Cleveland Orchestra—an international treasure recently ranked as the world’s favorite orchestra by Bachtrack, the international concert reviewer and online listing resource—with a 2013 grant of $10 million, the largest award to an arts organization in the foundation’s history. A leadership gift to the orchestra’s “Sound for the Centennial” campaign leading up to the celebration of the ensemble’s 100th anniversary in 2018, the grant provides support for day-to-day operations and creative programming designed to attract new audiences, especially younger listeners.

With its $250,000 grant to the Gay Games, the Cleveland Foundation became the first presenting sponsor in the 31-year history of this international sports competition open to all participants. Gay Games 9 is expected to bring 30,000 athletes and spectators to Cleveland in August 2014.

Greater Cleveland is the smallest metropolitan area to be chosen to host the games, which will present gold medals to the first-place winners of more than 35 sporting competitions. The Cleveland Foundation sponsorship, as well as the welcoming spirit of the City of Cleveland, the City of Akron and each community’s visitors bureau, were decisive factors in Greater Cleveland’s selection. In addition to securing the benefits of the competition’s anticipated $50 million economic impact on the region, the foundation seized the opportunity to express its strong support for the values of equality, social justice and human dignity.